The challenges of translating the erotic-divine poetry of the ninth century Tamil woman poet.

AK Ramanujan elucidated on translating the complex embedded
worlds of akam – the inner landscapes of passion and love – and puram – the
public domain of war and material reward. Among the formal issues he discussed
particularly in akam is the ullurai, hidden signifiers or implied markers that
anchor meaning and permit inner connections to float into understanding.
Ramanujan has suggested the term “metonymous metaphor” for this kind of formal
schema that “leaves out all points of comparison and all explicit markers of
comparison”.

Used extensively in love poems, the eraichi, another concept
intrinsic to Sangam poetics, is the implied meaning akin to an extensive system
of metonyms. Derived from allusions to nature that do not necessarily have a
systematic connection to what is being described, the employment of eraichi
requires the poet to have a thorough understanding of the local flora, fauna
and climate as well as their symbolism. For instance, the poet Kapilar named 99
flowers in a garland that the lovelorn heroine strung after bathing in a waterfall
– where each flower suggested a subtly different nuance of love.

The ullurai, “inner substance”, however, is the parallel or
substitute meaning that is inset in poems; it is an “implicit metaphor”. This
often alludes to mythology and is to be divined through knowledge of context
and codification. The ullurai becomes, as it were, a floating chamber of
meaning trapped in the underwater roots of the poem that must be released – for
the poem to blossom in the mind like a lotus opening at dawn.

Andal, a poet of exquisite allusions, used both poetic
devices effortlessly. In verse one of Song Nine, (Cintura Cempoti) she mentions small red bugs, akin to ladybirds,
swarming over green leaves. Beside the concreteness of the image, the emergence
of these confounding red bugs evokes the onset of the monsoon, and
consequently, the traditional time for men to return home from warfare and
palace work to help in agricultural duties of sowing. Therefore it is the time
for the lover to claim her in fecund wet surroundings – as ready as she is.

This “bugging” detail also suggests a possible pattern of
blood droplets implying she is menstruating, a woman already. And this too: she
waits impatiently, demanding her hymen be torn and she bleeds like rain falling
over the earth as her lover, the supreme god, takes her. Here is a version that
holds this cluster of embedded meanings:

Blood drops of ladybugs fluttering through moist sparklesettle on lush land like a scatter of rubies flungfrom skies reeling with rain – irradiating as my love for him who covers me all over with his darkness

Nacciyar Tirumoli
is a work of layered suggestion and unambiguous wild passion wedded to an
overwhelming enchantment with the divine. Andal’s unconditional surrender
(prabati) to Narayana-Vishnu is of such intensity and anguish that she scolds
and even rages against god while demanding his caress.

Other translations concentrate on expounding Srivaishnava
philosophy, using the guidance of scholars and historians to illuminate the
aforementioned aspects or render literal translations that exhibit remarkable
fidelity to the original; we have attempted to do something very different.

We
concentrate on the aesthetic properties of her songs, reimagining them as lyric
poems and foregrounding the metaphoric and sensory valences of her words, while
keeping the more esoteric and philosophic meanings in the background, informing
but never conscripting us. Our translations are very much a poet’s
translations, rather than a scholar’s.

Multiplicity of
Translations

If one imagines each of Andal’s verses to be like a luminous
underwater cavern, the devices of the eraichi and the ullurai would be like
whorls of differently coloured water swirling within. The translations of Andal
that we have read (and there are not many) and many fine translations of Sangam
era poetry use one of two strategies for translating these verses:

1. footnote and annotate extensively to render mythological
and inset allusions or provide a large section on notes to the poems;

2. expand each tight four-line stanza into a longer module
to include these allusions. This results in meshing levels of resonance into
one smooth, evenly coloured narrative.

For instance, Vidya Dehejia’s powerful translation of Hymn
Eight (vin nilamelappu), verse nine,
given below has Andal asking monsoon clouds to act as her messengers to the God
of the Universe.

O rain cloudsrearing like dark elephants above the hill of Venkatathe word of the lordwho slumbers upon the serpent has turned false.Forgetting that he ismy sole refugee,he torturesthe young maiden.If the world hears of it,will they speak well of him?

In order to catch the allusions, you need the context, which Dehejia brilliantly provides, but in our translations, we have opted to include the context within the poem itself, compressing the connotative with the denotative by developing our own distinctive method of coping with the levels of evocation in Andal’s work.

Below is Priya’s translation of the same verse that Dehejia has translated, which demonstrates the very different techniques that we are employing in this book. Immediate associations and meanings are bracketed in the word-for-word translation.

Priya has taken this and created a triptych that attempts to move from the literal to the eraichi to the ullurai. The first version is closest to her literal utterance.

In the second, the parallel, Priya peels Andal’s erudite mythological allusions and nature’s signifiers for landscapes become metonyms of inner vistas of love and longing.

The third, the inset, is the most free: in the hidden level Priya discovers Andal is explicit as she commands divinity to inhabit her pulsating corporality. This demanding third leap has often “arrived” piercingly, as an inversion of the literal meaning.

Andal says:

Great thunderheads rearing like maddened War elephants over Vengadam’s forested emeraldSummit ask him who makes his bed on the colossalCoils of the sacred serpent what words he said to me.He, Protector of the Universe, sole refuge to all is falseWith me, a maiden slender and trusting.In what light will the world judge him if he betrays Me, slays me instead? Shouldn’t he protect his name?

She also says:

Clouds clashing like rutting elephants trumpeting with trunks entwined over Vengadam’s peakask him who sleeps on the snake’s stupendous loops to awaken to my distress, to be not twistedin his words. He, Supreme Guardian of All ignores me as he slumbers, head secure beneath its hood.I blossom in love, a vine yearning to wrap around him. Howwill universes assess him if he lets me wither?

Taken together, the three versions of the poem move from the outer word to the inner world, and it is a kind of composite that allows the hidden power, manifest lyricism and colloquial address all to emerge together so as to approximate what is contained in Andal’s original version.

While this from Song Twelve, Take Me to His Sacred Places, was Priya’s response to Andal’s splitting of location and urge in each verse:

Vast dark clouds, flowers burning amethyst as his eyes and sapphire as his body, lotuses tender as his skin urge: “Go to him! Go!” to Hrisikesa who though chief among gurus waited sweating, belly pinched in hunger. He waited long for his share of sacrificial food at Bhaktilocana.

Take me now to that sacred grove. I’m hungry, I’m rapture’s offering, his food, he’s mine to devour.

Ravi, on the other hand, has evolved a poetics of spirituality that runs consistently through his distinctive worlding of Andal’s yearning; he abridges, uses ellipses and flights of the imagination to net and clothe her in words. This excerpt is from his Tiruppavai:

He is the peacock of the woods, who brightenedhis mother’s womb and whose very skin is suppleas a cobra’s hood, glistening as if basted in almondoil and we just can’t look away.

May our past crimes burn, let those yet to come burn and turn to ash, know us only as we are beforeyou now, cowgirls bathing in what pours from above,what rises from below to soak us.

Do you not hear dear friends how the birds chirrup,how resonant the conch sounds from the temple of Garuda’s lord? It pervades the air with his name – Hari. Hari. Hari. Hurry.

Or this, from Nacciyar Tirumoli, Song Ten, Dark Flowers:

O black cuckoo what ravaged garden girdsyour song? Whirr plaintively instead a blue-note for the one with a fluttering banner on an immaculate field who alone holds the purpose of my life as mere song in his paws that we will both hear to vanish with us.

Or this, from Dark Clouds Be My Messenger:

Wine-dark clouds, massed ready for monsoon, Batter the name of my beloved on Vengadam, for valiant in battle, he is finally ready to put down his arms and come home to be with me. Tell him like the scrolls of leaves that fall unread after prolonged rain has stripped the branches, I too waste away, unread, waiting for the day he might translate the secret letters of my limbs.

Ravi attempts to refined a line possessed of a geometric
intricacy that can speak to the tension between divine order and disorder,
while Priya has evolved a strategy that will permit the swirling whorls of
eraichi and ullurai to manifest, each with its unique iridescence, edge, expansion
and inflection, so that the body of each translated verse retains its
multi-hued complexity and extends the expansive reader receptivity Andal
demanded.

Priya’s versions of the poems are full of pulsations that
suggest the hidden and sacred transmutations of inner and outer worlds, while
Ravi’s are less fragmented and more fluent.

Equally spiritual in affect, and complex in poetic
sensibility, both translations, when set side to side, illumine a totality
about Andal that neither one individually could capture.

Even though we both read and edited the work together, it is
because of the polyvalence of Tamil poetry generally, and Andal’s work
specifically, that we’ve chosen to employ this strategy of including multiple
versions of the same poems. This methodology, unique among works of
translation, attempts to get at both the philosophical and literal
underpinnings of her work.

Such multiple versioning is risky; it could also become
merely of academic interest. But perhaps the distinctive allusiveness that
leaps out at each level of exploration will be retained and echo into the next
like a shimmering streak of colour dissolving.

Excerpted with
permission from the section ‘Translators’ Note’ from Andal: The
Autobiography of a Goddess, Translated
and Edited by Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Ravi Shankar.

Adopting three simple habits can help maximise the benefits of existing sanitation infrastructure.

India’s sanitation problem is well documented – the country was recently declared as having the highest number of people living without basic sanitation facilities. Sanitation encompasses all conditions relating to public health - especially sewage disposal and access to clean drinking water. Due to associated losses in productivity caused by sickness, increased healthcare costs and increased mortality, India recorded a loss of 5.2% of its GDP to poor sanitation in 2015. As tremendous as the economic losses are, the on-ground, human consequences of poor sanitation are grim - about one in 10 deaths, according to the World Bank.

Poor sanitation contributes to about 10% of the world’s disease burden and is linked to even those diseases that may not present any correlation at first. For example, while lack of nutrition is a direct cause of anaemia, poor sanitation can contribute to the problem by causing intestinal diseases which prevent people from absorbing nutrition from their food. In fact, a study found a correlation between improved sanitation and reduced prevalence of anaemia in 14 Indian states. Diarrhoeal diseases, the most well-known consequence of poor sanitation, are the third largest cause of child mortality in India. They are also linked to undernutrition and stunting in children - 38% of Indian children exhibit stunted growth. Improved sanitation can also help reduce prevalence of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Though not a cause of high mortality rate, NTDs impair physical and cognitive development, contribute to mother and child illness and death and affect overall productivity. NTDs caused by parasitic worms - such as hookworms, whipworms etc. - infect millions every year and spread through open defecation. Improving toilet access and access to clean drinking water can significantly boost disease control programmes for diarrhoea, NTDs and other correlated conditions.

Unfortunately, with about 732 million people who have no access to toilets, India currently accounts for more than half of the world population that defecates in the open. India also accounts for the largest rural population living without access to clean water. Only 16% of India’s rural population is currently served by piped water.

However, there is cause for optimism. In the three years of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the country’s sanitation coverage has risen from 39% to 65% and eight states and Union Territories have been declared open defecation free. But lasting change cannot be ensured by the proliferation of sanitation infrastructure alone. Ensuring the usage of toilets is as important as building them, more so due to the cultural preference for open defecation in rural India.

According to the World Bank, hygiene promotion is essential to realise the potential of infrastructure investments in sanitation. Behavioural intervention is most successful when it targets few behaviours with the most potential for impact. An area of public health where behavioural training has made an impact is WASH - water, sanitation and hygiene - a key issue of UN Sustainable Development Goal 6. Compliance to WASH practices has the potential to reduce illness and death, poverty and improve overall socio-economic development. The UN has even marked observance days for each - World Water Day for water (22 March), World Toilet Day for sanitation (19 November) and Global Handwashing Day for hygiene (15 October).

At its simplest, the benefits of WASH can be availed through three simple habits that safeguard against disease - washing hands before eating, drinking clean water and using a clean toilet. Handwashing and use of toilets are some of the most important behavioural interventions that keep diarrhoeal diseases from spreading, while clean drinking water is essential to prevent water-borne diseases and adverse health effects of toxic contaminants. In India, Hindustan Unilever Limited launched the Swachh Aadat Swachh Bharat initiative, a WASH behaviour change programme, to complement the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Through its on-ground behaviour change model, SASB seeks to promote the three basic WASH habits to create long-lasting personal hygiene compliance among the populations it serves.

This touching film made as a part of SASB’s awareness campaign shows how lack of knowledge of basic hygiene practices means children miss out on developmental milestones due to preventable diseases.

Play

SASB created the Swachhata curriculum, a textbook to encourage adoption of personal hygiene among school going children. It makes use of conceptual learning to teach primary school students about cleanliness, germs and clean habits in an engaging manner. Swachh Basti is an extensive urban outreach programme for sensitising urban slum residents about WASH habits through demos, skits and etc. in partnership with key local stakeholders such as doctors, anganwadi workers and support groups. In Ghatkopar, Mumbai, HUL built the first-of-its-kind Suvidha Centre - an urban water, hygiene and sanitation community centre. It provides toilets, handwashing and shower facilities, safe drinking water and state-of-the-art laundry operations at an affordable cost to about 1,500 residents of the area.

HUL’s factory workers also act as Swachhata Doots, or messengers of change who teach the three habits of WASH in their own villages. This mobile-led rural behaviour change communication model also provides a volunteering opportunity to those who are busy but wish to make a difference. A toolkit especially designed for this purpose helps volunteers approach, explain and teach people in their immediate vicinity - their drivers, cooks, domestic helps etc. - about the three simple habits for better hygiene. This helps cast the net of awareness wider as regular interaction is conducive to habit formation. To learn more about their volunteering programme, click here. To learn more about the Swachh Aadat Swachh Bharat initiative, click here.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Hindustan Unilever and not by the Scroll editorial team.